Monday, June 8, 2009

So this weekend. we'll start with thursday night - we had to be at the central train station at about 7 to get on the bus at 730 which turned into 8pm so we got told we weren't allowed to sit down or be in front of the Nike store which is the meeting place for the bus to alps trips.. next we hopped on the bus and had a 4 to 5 hour bus ride to Sorrento where we were staying for the weekend - it flew by we probably played about 40 games of euchre if i had to guess.. lol. from there we arrived at our hostel which was extremely nice - the staff was amazing and the accommodations were lovely.. we were so hungry since we didn't stop for dinner and the staff brought us out some free snacks and some left over cake from a party - the cake was amazing!! friday we had to be up bright and early to get ready to go to capri. well the weather was too bad to go there - since we wanted to go into the blue grotto. and we had to make other arrangements so we went to Pompei instead. pompei is an ancient town that is now ruins - when we were there we walked around the ruins which were well preserved because they were once over taken by a volcano eruption from mount vesuvious so we saw fast food restaurants they had, old houses, and mosaic art they made in addition to many other things. from there we had a break for lunch and had to gear up to climb a volcano. we got all our stuff together hopped on a bus and rode up quite a ways - from there we paid to climb to the top of the crater and we were able to look down inside of it which was pretty awesome and the skyline view was amazing! it was quite a hike so that was a nice treat at the end. after this we went back to our hostel, and got ready to go to dinner - they had planned a dinner out somewhere in town so that we could have a nice dinner with everyone - it was just that very nice :) we had five course meals and the food was delicious - however the service not so amazing - they don't care really about customer service in italy like they do in america. saturday we awoke to find out we were going to go to CAPRI! the long awaited capri - everyone says how wonderful it is. and i mean all these places are just amazing - so we get our own private boat to take us to the island and take us around and we end up at the blue grotto - basically you have to get in a row boat and lay in the bottom of it to get inside the blue grotto. and when your in there the rocks don't go all they way down to the bottom of the sea so the sunlight reflects into this cave making everything a crystal blue color - aka its pretty amazing. our guide told us its about 80 feet deep and it was the roman kings swimming pool - and you aren't allowed to swim in it well so the sign says but our guide let me sarah and kendra jump in to swim in the blue grotto for a while - we were the only ones that got to swim in it - so i now get to say i swam in caesars pool :) hehe - after the blue grotto we hopped back on our boats and continued on to the main land part of the island. from there we were allowed to explore the island and lay out on the beach - we also we told we could taste limoncello - which is a lemon, vodka, sugar dessert alcohol that is produced on the island of capri and only served in italy. so we tried a variety of flavors, in addition they grow some massive lemons were talking lemons the size of cantelopes and they make lemon flavored everything - chocolate is another specialty so that was amazing to taste the variety of chocolates they produced. after that we just laid on the beach and waited for our boat to come back and pick us up.we had saturday night to chill out and hang out with our friends at the hostel so we just sat back - had a glass of wine and hung out all nightsunday we were on our way to Positano we packed up our things and hopped back on the bus to get us close to town. from there we had to climb up the hillside again to get to the main part of town. once we were here it was really nice - we just kinda hung out on the beach, swam and relaxed all day - which was really nice after go go go all weekend. however they were offering cliff diving as an excursion which sounded cool so we rented a boat to go find a cliff to jump off of and the water was to rough to jump but we did hop in to swim, the current was really strong we made it to the rock to climb but the current was to strong and wouldn't allow us to climb up the stone so after hopping in we hopped right back out and onto the boat. (sounds a lot easier than it was, right?) on our way back onto the boat Meghan got stung by a jellyfish.. which sucked. and we made our way back to the mainland got some lunch and gelato, got all cleaned up and made our way back up the 500 stairs we had climbed to get down, hopped on a few buses and went back to our hostel to get on the main bus and drove back to rome! the ride back to rome was about 5 hours and we jumped on a bus that took us back to our apartment and did a little homework last night and crashed - it was an exhausting but amazing weekend!